Developer Pills

Vista gone crazy

This morning suddnly my connection shows this creppy yellow road sign with Limted Connectivity as the problem. tried to use the Network & Sharing Center tools to figure out what happend and when i hit View Status on the connected network interface i discoverd that Vista is gone wild!!!

Did't know that my line is that fast :D

Merry Christmas everyone

We Wish you a Merry Christmas , 

  And Happy New Year !

 Check here for how you can say merry christmas for your  other friends!      

Google acquire, old news... now they hire!

We know the big companies tend to acquire the small ones that may seem to have a chance to harm their revenue.

Microsoft did that before with FoxPro, Ericsson too and many other but i ran today in new behavior - to me at least - Google hire the iRows guys.

And if you don't know iRows started early this year as an online spreadsheet application like many other including numsum,Thinkfree and Google Docs & Spreadsheets. but seems like their product was so good and these guys were talanted so that Google hire them and their project will shutdown december 31 why shutdown the project couldn't they work for Google and continue their small business ;) .

This makes me rethink of the whole idea of the online application at first i thought it will be good thing for individual developers who can reach customers much easier and small businesses can do so, but now it dosn't seem like it promised.

you may read the comments on this news here.

Annoying problem Outlook 2007 Syndication fails

This is really annoying i just install the Enterprise version of Office 2007 yesterday everything is goin smoth was happy with the little new feature in Outlook 2007 which save you the hassle of configuring your email account with all the SMTP and POP3 addresses and port numbers. now Outlook gives you the option to automatically acquire this information for you, just by supplying your username and password.

I have experianced proplems with feed syndication since i start using Vista, but thought with the Outlook 2007 independant RSS engine - yes, the Outlook RSS platform is seprate from the Windows Vista one - Syndication should work just fine but i was wrong.

The experience dammed when i have my RSS feeds list imported from Internet Explorer, Outlook downloaded the most recent posts for every blog or website. but that's it.. any other addition posts after i added the RSS feed is no longer updated.

The error returns

  Task 'RSS Feeds' reported error (0x9AC40155) : 'Synchronization to RSS Feed:"http://anyurl.com/rss.aspx" has failed. Outlook cannot download the RSS content from http://anyurl.com/rss.aspx because of a problem connecting to the server.'

In the KB article 917125 that i thought might help but sadly didn't even it was descriping simelar issue, read here.

So does this happend with you?

[UPDATE] just came across this post where these guys encounter the same problem, also have to mention that Windows Live Mail Desktop works fine with RSS! - i thought i was Vista fault, still could be.

Should i use WCF (HTTP-binding) or stick with WS ?

I came to point that i should use a web service for the current project i'm developing and since i like to play with new technologies so i figured why not implement the web service using Windows Communication Foundation insted of "Old" ASMX.

So to be realistic i did a little home work before i decided anything (it's not my call entirely anyway as i have to convince my colleagues) also to have a full view you should know that i will use basic HTTP with SOPA.

the result was STICK WITH WS FOR NOW.

here's why:

- First the WCF need .NET 3.0 which will be another componant to install in the other hand ASMX will work just fine also Windows Vista is the only OS with .NET Framework 3.0 pre-installed.

- I will use basic HTTP with SOAP so i will not benfit from the most powerfull WCF features.

- the migration from WS to WCF is very easy so if in future i decied to implement some addition WS-* for example WS-Security which will be way easy on WCF or if i decided to boost the performance using TCP will be an easy job.

- At last will state again the back-compatapility as i don't know if Microsoft will push the .NET 3.0 back to Windows XP via Windows Update or maybe SP3 so why no stick with the poular when the change any time is peace of cake.

Windows next version code named "Fiji"

Windows Vista still not relesed for the home users ( Business users editions only available now ) Microsoft is working now on the next version of the current Vista.

The new version code named "Fiji" will be relese around late 2008, some resources says that this won't be a major relese but will only be kind of Vista R2.

"Fiji" is an island in the south pacific ocean you can read more about "Fiji" the island here, and the Windows here.

My Vista Installation Experiance

Decided today to upgrade my XP box to Windows Vista and my installation experiance was amazing...

first will state my machine configuration

P4HT 3.06 GHz with 1.0 GB of DDR2 Rams, Nvida GeForce 6200 128MB TC.

I start the installation on my 20 GB partition the whole installation process take 25 min with 2 restarts of my machine.

Installation was smoth didn't experiance any problems at all.

first thing catch my eyes is the Network & Sharing Center with alots of improvment will talk about it later... as i wiill have to install VS2005 now hopeing the compatapility issue dosn't stop my current project.

In Your face 2 - Vista Protected Mode, IE7, IE6.x way secure than FF,Opera and Flash Player

This is the seconed episode of IN YOUR FACE this time, Donna has just posted about a little test she did with some security scanners like BigFix to discover that from over than 44,000 program inspectors discoverd 35% insecure versions.

just pointing out that the inspectors discoverd only 4.12% of IE6.x version insecure - thanks to Windows Update - and that FireFox 1.x has 35.47% insecured version installed and used everyday.

Also scanning 7 programs including IE7 on Vista Protected Mode the insecure version found = 0 which is great not only for the 0 number but also for that Vista have no security updates yet so this is raw Vista.

Other details can be found here.

Writing simple test case

One of my friend asked me to write some example if we could say for test cases as he is going to interview for .NET Developer job and they propaly will ask him to do so which they did and a little snippet here let him pass the quistion so i decided to blog about it so may any one benfit

The thing is that for Developers job they usualy don't ask those big testing quistions or require you to write complix test cases but they certinly wanted to know that you have a bit background on the subject.

say you have a function that determine if the input is an even number

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bool IsEven(int x)
        {
            if (x % 2 == 0)
                return true;                                                       
            else
                return false;
        }

In the line 3 i used % which will return the reminder of the division operation and checked if this match the 0 then the operation is for even number otherwise odd.

For testing such a function we will use the Assertion which provided through the namespace System.Diagnostics and the class Debug to write something like this.

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Debug.Assert(IsEven(3) == true);
Debug.Assert(IsEven(0) == true); 
Debug.Assert(IsEven(-5) == false);                                                 
Debug.Assert(IsEven(6) != IsEven(13));

If you intrested in the subject of Unit Testing i recommend you to take a read to Marc's Article . enjoy.

Office Open XML Format finally is an ECMA standard

Finally ECMA has approved Open XML format as standard 376, this is a great new i think first product to adopt and benfit from this format its Microsoft Office 2007 which is out now you can check some Open XML scenarios which will be the default format for Office documents here.

For playing with the new document format refer to Kevin Boske post.